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by Plutarch (Author)
The third volume of Plutarch's masterwork of classical biography, pairing Greek and Roman figures to examine the moral texture of leadership.
In Parallel Lives, Plutarch refines biography into a study of character under pressure. Each life considers not only public deeds-campaigns, reforms, rivalries-but the private impulses that animated them. By placing a Greek statesman beside a Roman counterpart, he invites comparison: courage and caution, ambition and restraint, clemency and severity. History becomes a laboratory for ethical reflection.
Volume 3 continues this disciplined sequence, presenting additional paired portraits that reveal how temperament shapes power and how small personal habits can alter the course of nations. Composed in the early Roman Empire yet drawing upon centuries of Greek and Roman history, Parallel Lives remains foundational to classical studies, political thought, and the art of biography.
